Just very recently I had the good fortune of meeting a man who flies airliners for a living.  It sounds very glamorous being a pilot but he assured me he did not have a glamorous job!  At one time he piloted jets for British Airways then decided to make a change and fly for Easy Jet.  I think he regretted making that change in his career.

As we chatted about aeroplanes and stuff like that it came into conversation that I was a Minister in the Church of Scotland.  He instantly named his local minister and asked if I knew him.  I knew of him I replied; at which point he told me how difficult he found it to cope with his local minister’s manner.  Not that he was bad mannered you understand – just that he was so intensely religious.  Every conversation came back to something in church or to do with the bible, or prayer, or evangelism – it was impossible to have a normal conversation with their Minister.  His manner was stifling and smothering.  From what little I knew of their Minister I knew they were speaking the truth!

Maybe we have all met someone like that within Christian circles; someone so intense in talking about their faith that you no longer feel you are speaking to a real person.  If it is true of individual Christians it can also be true of Christian gatherings.

There can be something very stifling about spending time exclusively with Christians.  Christians are often so concerned to do the right thing and to act in the right way that they don't always come across as being quite real.  Spending time with those who don’t seem to have anything else to talk about but their last Bible Study meeting can get to be very wearing.  This may be true of devotees of other religions as well, but it seems to be less true of those who have no religious affiliation.  The company of those who have no spiritual pretensions whatsoever can therefore be very refreshing and I find myself looking forward to the robust wit and humour and friendship of those who have no church connections and no pretensions of faith. 

We Christians have something of a dilemma.  On the one hand, Jesus tells us to be real and truthful about who and what we are, he deplores those whom he considers to be hypocrites who hide behind some religious façade. On the other hand Paul spends a lot of time telling us how we ought to behave.  The instructions given in today's reading from the letter to the Ephesians makes quite depressing reading and sounds like the sort of instructions the Victorians were fond of issuing.

Today's verses have a very negative sound and they seem devoid of fun.  We're told to be careful how we live.  We must be wise and make the most of our time.  We're warned against alcohol and told instead to be filled with the spirit, singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.  And we're told to spend the whole of our time giving thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

For me, this passage reinforces those Victorian images of life after death spent sitting on a cloud twanging a harp.  The thought of spending eternity singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs appals me.  It might be good at the beginning but unless my brain is switched off or my personality disengaged I’m tempted to think I might just get a little tired of it.

At the same time we recognise there is an awful lot of evil in the world and I certainly wouldn't want to promote that evil either wittingly or unwittingly.  A well-known brand of ice cream hit upon the brilliant idea of marketing their products under the name of the seven deadly sins.  And so we're encouraged to indulge in jealousy and greed and so on.  Just a bit of good-humoured fun to sell a product, but it's constantly reinforcing the message that sin is just a bit of fun to be enjoyed.  We can be a little bit wicked, we can walk on the dark side, challenge the boundaries and the conventional taboos of life and it will be OK.

So being good is boring and being a little naughty is good fun!

How do Christians strike the balance between being kill-joys and indulging in the sins, which militate against God and against spirituality? And how can Christians promote Christianity without being entirely negative and turning people against God by an obvious disapproval of what other people regard as enjoyment?

I'm sure that Jesus had the right answer when he encouraged his followers not to put on airs and graces or to wear a Christian façade, but to constantly work at being themselves.  To be real people and not “Holier Than Thou”.  Those of us who are grown up have spent so long trying to conform to what other people require of us, that many of us no longer really know quite what we're like deep inside.  Sometimes our inner self bursts out and startles us and we find ourselves doing something really unexpected.  Sometimes we can frighten ourselves by the intensity of our reactions.  When this happens we tend to say things like, "I don't know what got into me." Or we might describe someone else who has acted apparently out of character as being "beside himself" with rage. 

Actually we're all acting in character, but it's a part of our character, which we’ve never been allowed to explore.  We only reach those hidden depths when we lose control and the experience is often so terrifying that we do all we can never to lose control.  But this means that those hidden depths are pushed further and further away until we soon deny that they exist at all.  When that happens our façade becomes more and more intense, and we move further and further away from reality whilst kidding ourselves that we know all there is to know about our own self.

For Christians all of this is compounded, because we know exactly how we ought to behave; we are meant to be good and nice all the time to everyone, we are afraid that if we let go and allow our behaviour to be uncontrolled, we will let down both God and Christianity.

This is however, one of the risks of Christianity.  We need to trust Jesus when he says that he loves us exactly as we are.  We need to face the humiliation and the shame that the worst of our behaviour can produce in us.  We need to know that even though we might feel humiliated and ashamed, Jesus never feels ashamed of us.  Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves for our faults our failings our weaknesses, just as Jesus forgives us.

Amazingly, we'll discover that the awfulness that we thought was inside us isn't nearly so awful after all.  When we let the light shine on the dark bits they stop being quite so dark.  And with that incredible discovery comes a real freedom, a freedom to behave as we like, to have fun and to enjoy life.

That strait-laced disapproval disappears.  The kill-joy disappears.  Christian joy and happiness engulfs our being without us having to do anything about it.  Like Jesus, we'll find ourselves overflowing with Christian love.  We'll sing and make a melody to the Lord in our hearts, and we won't be able to stop giving thanks to God for everything, through Jesus Christ.